JiveTurkey
New member
This is my Salt Water Story.
Today I have a nice going on ten year established marine aquarium. I want to begin by saying that I had zero zilch zip nada (read; none) experience regarding salt aquariums. When I was a gradeschool kid I worked my way through a few aquariums eventually winding up with a really impressive pair of Africanized Cichlids or Oscars that grew to be so huge I had to give them to my high school oceanography teacher.
When my mom and I (she's my whole living family, we are very close probably codependent hermits who happen to be best friends, after all she taught me all the cool stuff in life) bought the house we are now living in one of the things we were really excited about was that it came with a 225 gallon salt aquarium established. Ironically the seller said every prospective buyer wanted it taken out. We'll it had been a long time since my freshwater days but in the intervening years I discovered maturity by speedily graduating from a community college so I could take care of my 80 year old granny who had broken her back, had her husband of FIFTY FOUR YEARS run off with a 30 year old, and been left with a 15 acre farm with horses and chickens and dogs (oh my!) on a mountainside in a nowhere town called Bristol Tennessee to take care of. As I was originally going to be a physician (my where life's currents pull us?!) I had plenty of medical training and my mom was a respiratory therapist, we promised granny she could stay in her own bed/home/farm no matter what till the end.
Let me tell you, keeping a reef is tough but caring for a person you love while they die literally and figuratively from a broken heart? Tougher. Fortunately granny and I got on famously (I'm an analog man, 35mm film, vacuum tubes, axes over chainsaws) so taking care of her was a burden I would undertake again at any time if it meant I could get to be around her and listen to her again. Taking care of the chickens turned me into a vegan (really, the best thing ever to happen to my health) and I'm not a dog person, so that was very challenging but I did it for Grandma.
Anyway I guess the long winded point I'm struggling to string together here is that someone with very little experience can have great success. We have lived in our house two years now and the tank is still doing amazingly well. I have decided the less changes I make to the mini ecosystem the better off I will be overall. Initially I had a local company send out their "best guy" to help me keep on top of things for a month or so but it ended when he cornered my mom asking her for $5000 cash with some sob story about his girlfriends DUI. Seriously, you cannot make this up!! Since then I have been on my own except for last Thursday when my sump and recirc pumps failed within hours of each other out of old age. I enlisted Shane from the LFS to help me out with some of the work as I have a genetic disorder called Ehlers-Danlos which inhibits me somewhat on the good days and can incapacitate me on the bad ones. Most people with it are zonked on pain pills but I'm not interested in that! I had a triple hernia repair (two inguinal one umbilical) last year (the rate of recurrence in hernias for people with my genetic disorder is one in ten) and the pills they gave me for that worked on the first day, nada on the subsequent ones so I switched to ice bags on the groin.
Anyway. I have only added one fish since taking over the tank, a nice Naso Tang I named Gary. A few fish have died including my monster Lunare Wrasse who became trapped in a conch skeleton. Over these past two years a yellowtail blue damsel, and a six line wrasse fell victim to the Lunare. The two clownfish died within days of each other as they had spawned only to have their babied devoured by Larry the Lunare before he harassed them to death. Actually I blamed a lot on the big Wrasse and was sorry to see him go but am excited to try and branch into corals. Another original occupant of the tank, a frustratingly gorgeous Bannerfish will have to go as she/he is not reef safe.
The other original members of the crew from when I took over control of the tank include a huge pair of pajama cards, a wonderfully social and feisty Royal Gramma, a Mandarin I didn't even know I had for a month but who is now a very close pal (he comes out when I'm around), a still shy coral beauty, a hilariously ancient and finless yellow tang, and that's it! The only corals in the tank when I moved in were a tiny patch of green star polyps. They're still there. I will be trying to add corals because of the death of my Lunare. I can't just "replace" a fish because their personality doesn't come with in the new body. So I am choosing a new direction. I have three modest test corals presently and I will doubtless be asking many dumb coral related queries in the future.
Also here's a picture or two.
Today I have a nice going on ten year established marine aquarium. I want to begin by saying that I had zero zilch zip nada (read; none) experience regarding salt aquariums. When I was a gradeschool kid I worked my way through a few aquariums eventually winding up with a really impressive pair of Africanized Cichlids or Oscars that grew to be so huge I had to give them to my high school oceanography teacher.
When my mom and I (she's my whole living family, we are very close probably codependent hermits who happen to be best friends, after all she taught me all the cool stuff in life) bought the house we are now living in one of the things we were really excited about was that it came with a 225 gallon salt aquarium established. Ironically the seller said every prospective buyer wanted it taken out. We'll it had been a long time since my freshwater days but in the intervening years I discovered maturity by speedily graduating from a community college so I could take care of my 80 year old granny who had broken her back, had her husband of FIFTY FOUR YEARS run off with a 30 year old, and been left with a 15 acre farm with horses and chickens and dogs (oh my!) on a mountainside in a nowhere town called Bristol Tennessee to take care of. As I was originally going to be a physician (my where life's currents pull us?!) I had plenty of medical training and my mom was a respiratory therapist, we promised granny she could stay in her own bed/home/farm no matter what till the end.
Let me tell you, keeping a reef is tough but caring for a person you love while they die literally and figuratively from a broken heart? Tougher. Fortunately granny and I got on famously (I'm an analog man, 35mm film, vacuum tubes, axes over chainsaws) so taking care of her was a burden I would undertake again at any time if it meant I could get to be around her and listen to her again. Taking care of the chickens turned me into a vegan (really, the best thing ever to happen to my health) and I'm not a dog person, so that was very challenging but I did it for Grandma.
Anyway I guess the long winded point I'm struggling to string together here is that someone with very little experience can have great success. We have lived in our house two years now and the tank is still doing amazingly well. I have decided the less changes I make to the mini ecosystem the better off I will be overall. Initially I had a local company send out their "best guy" to help me keep on top of things for a month or so but it ended when he cornered my mom asking her for $5000 cash with some sob story about his girlfriends DUI. Seriously, you cannot make this up!! Since then I have been on my own except for last Thursday when my sump and recirc pumps failed within hours of each other out of old age. I enlisted Shane from the LFS to help me out with some of the work as I have a genetic disorder called Ehlers-Danlos which inhibits me somewhat on the good days and can incapacitate me on the bad ones. Most people with it are zonked on pain pills but I'm not interested in that! I had a triple hernia repair (two inguinal one umbilical) last year (the rate of recurrence in hernias for people with my genetic disorder is one in ten) and the pills they gave me for that worked on the first day, nada on the subsequent ones so I switched to ice bags on the groin.
Anyway. I have only added one fish since taking over the tank, a nice Naso Tang I named Gary. A few fish have died including my monster Lunare Wrasse who became trapped in a conch skeleton. Over these past two years a yellowtail blue damsel, and a six line wrasse fell victim to the Lunare. The two clownfish died within days of each other as they had spawned only to have their babied devoured by Larry the Lunare before he harassed them to death. Actually I blamed a lot on the big Wrasse and was sorry to see him go but am excited to try and branch into corals. Another original occupant of the tank, a frustratingly gorgeous Bannerfish will have to go as she/he is not reef safe.
The other original members of the crew from when I took over control of the tank include a huge pair of pajama cards, a wonderfully social and feisty Royal Gramma, a Mandarin I didn't even know I had for a month but who is now a very close pal (he comes out when I'm around), a still shy coral beauty, a hilariously ancient and finless yellow tang, and that's it! The only corals in the tank when I moved in were a tiny patch of green star polyps. They're still there. I will be trying to add corals because of the death of my Lunare. I can't just "replace" a fish because their personality doesn't come with in the new body. So I am choosing a new direction. I have three modest test corals presently and I will doubtless be asking many dumb coral related queries in the future.
Also here's a picture or two.
